Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

CHAPTER 16 STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION AND INTERNAL MARKETING
and collaboration between marketing, human resource management, finance and accounting, 
sales, operations functions and external partners. We suggested that perhaps one of the most 
important roles of internal marketing goes beyond aligning employees’ values and behaviours 
with strategies, and confronts the need to achieve superior customer value through seamless-
ness in strategy delivery. This role emphasises internal marketing to achieve cross-functional 
partnerships within the organisation, and crossing organisational boundaries to align external 
partners with the imperatives of marketing strategy.
The long-term approach to effective strategy implementation is likely to be one that bal-
ances process management and execution skills in order to produce an integrated strategy 
and implementation approach – one that enhances a company’s implementation capabilities.
The retailer’s boss is transforming the 
business — and is prepared to make 
mistakes
Internal politics had supposedly never played 
much of a role in the tangled web of companies 
that makes up the world’s largest furniture 
retailer. But when Inter Ikea, little-known owner 
of the brand and concept, acquired the product 
range, design and manufacturing businesses 
in 2016 from its more famous sister company, 
Ikea Group, Torbjorn Loof was struck by the 
infighting.
The chief executive of Inter Ikea says: ‘In the 
midst of everything, we also saw a bit of what 
we call political behaviour in the company. In 
the beginning that surprised me. When you 
work in Ikea you don’t know how to handle that 
because this was something new.’
The 53-year-old is running a franchise system 
that decides everything: from which products 
are on offer and what the stores look like, to the 
famous catalogues and flat-pack design. But rather 
than use his new-found power and influence, Mr Loof 
took a different approach.
‘Of course, it’s easier for the party who in our case 
acquired resources, acquired influence . . . You need 
to understand and respect the partner that you are 
doing the deal with: to say what do you need and 
what’s your perspective on this? You have almost 
to put yourself mentally in their shoes,’ he adds, in 
an interview in the store in Almhult, the southern 
Swedish town that was the birthplace of Ikea 76 
years ago.
Mr Loof was raised in the nearby hamlet of Pjat-
teryd, and has worked at Ikea for 30 years in a variety 
Case study
of roles from purchaser and manager in Italy, to head 
of Ikea Sweden, the company at the heart of the empire 
that designs its products and was part of the 2016 deal.
That acquisition – completed a year after he 
became chief executive of Inter Ikea – was in large